An autobiography
Kempe lived in East Anglia, had 14 children, was at various times the owner of a horse-mill and a brewery, and later was a religious mystic. The book is a window on the life of an ordinary, middle-class person in a prosperous town in late mediaeval England, tracing her experiences, feelings, everyday life, failures, travels, overwhelming Christian visions, the scorn and threats which they attracted and her spiritual quest. It is seen as the first autobiography in English. Since she was illiterate it was dictated.
